Hanover Avenue changes will slow traffic, boost safety

The center island being installed on Hanover Avenue between Irving and… (DAN HARTZELL, THE MORNING…)

November 08, 2012|Dan Hartzell | The Road Warrior

Q: I would like to know whom to commend for deciding to place a sprawling slab of concrete in the middle of Hanover Avenue at the Irving Street intersection. I have often thought what a good idea it would be to place a huge obstacle to traffic flow at that very location, particularly during peak traffic hours. However, one should be wiser when considering the cost of such an endeavor. Wouldn't it be less expensive to simply park an old tractor-trailer in the middle of the street? Think of the savings to the taxpayers!

— Mark Tracy, Emmaus

A: Don't ease off the accelerator, Mark. Tell us what you really think of the traffic-calming measures being implemented on Hanover Avenue east of the Irving Street intersection.

There's no way around it: A raised center island on the roughly 500-foot-long block of Hanover between Irving and Jasper streets will slow the flow of traffic somewhat, which can't help but further complicate rush hour snarls.

But that's a price city officials are willing to pay — along with the $437,000 sticker on the window of the project — for making the mile-long stretch of Hanover between Irving Street and Club Avenue safer, particularly for pedestrians. That's the main destination traffic engineers have programmed into their GPS units for the work, which in addition to the center island will include many crosswalk-marking improvements.

Residents of this portion of east Allentown and others brought horsepower to their drive for safety improvements on Hanover a couple of years ago. The December 2009 death of 83-year-old Rose Venditto when she was hit by a car while trying to cross the avenue just a few feet from her church, Our Lady Help of Christians, helped turn the key on a public effort to improve pedestrian safety on the stretch.

With Venditto's death, Theresa Treiber of Whitehall Township had had enough. She'd lost her parents, Evelyn and Arthur Rice, to a pedestrian accident two years earlier at the same location under tragically similar circumstances. Treiber put a lobbying effort for safety improvements into gear, and the work being done now is the culmination of the efforts of herself and others.

A 2010 Morning Call review of federal safety statistics (conducted not by myself, but a colleague at the time) showed that 36 fatal accidents occurred on Hanover Avenue between 2000 and 2008 — 17 percent of all the fatal crashes in the city during the period. Venditto was the seventh person to lose her life on the road in a three-year span.

The city conducted a traffic study that surprisingly concluded speeding was not a major issue on Hanover: 85 percent of motorists obeyed the 35 mph limit, according to the survey. (Residents disagreed based on their personal observations, but almost everyone thinks other motorists go too fast through their neighborhoods.)

In any event, the city developed a plan designed not chiefly to slow traffic, but rather to protect pedestrians by providing safe havens via the 11-foot-wide, block-long island, as well as by adding marked crosswalks, increasing the visibility of existing walks, adding turn lanes at intersections, and other improvements.

The curbed island, which will feature landscaping and trees when it's finished, will shorten the distance of traffic exposure for pedestrians crossing Hanover by narrowing the roadway lanes and providing walkers with a place of refuge in the middle, said Rich Young, Allentown's public works director. Other crosswalks will feature hard-to-miss piano-style surface markings with wide white sections set off by narrower black bands, using long-lasting thermoplastic applications like those used for stop bars and other markings, he said.

Though "speeding wasn't necessarily the issue" driving the danger level on Hanover, "this will have a tendency to slow traffic down anyway," Young said. That's a secondary result of the work, and not a bad one, given the circumstances, he said.

Any worsening of rush hour traffic flow simply can't be avoided, with safety getting the inside track, according to Young. "When you're in a high-pedestrian area, it's not a bad thing to have traffic moving slower," he said.

The addition of turning lanes at some intersections, including Irving, Jerome and Maxwell, should help move things along more efficiently, making up for some of the drag-brake effect, and a two-way center left-turn lane — the kind available to traffic in either direction — between Jerome and Sherman streets should help clarify the traffic pattern, also improving flow.

Hanover is a relatively wide city street, and though it's intended as a two-lane road, on some stretches motorists treat it as a four-laner (or try to), passing slower cars going in the same direction despite the absence of white-hash lane lines, Young said. The new design will eliminate that.

We'll have to see how it all works out, Mark. I don't think the road will be quite as rough as you imagine, even during rush periods.